Camp Sharigan, Elaine's two-week motivational reading program, emphasizes phonemic and phonological awareness and using the lowercase alphabet. Research shows that children struggling in reading often cannot identify lowercase alphabet letters. Seven first graders currently enrolled in Camp Sharigan do not yet know their lowercase alphabet. They cannot identify the letter or give the letter sound(s). They only know the capital letters, but most books are written using lowercase letters. So, the first place to begin teaching a child to read is to teach the lowercase consonant letter sounds.

The picture below, from Elaine's year-long Reading Orienteering Club, is a project for children to create. They capture new words (we never miss words; we capture tricky words) and write them with lower case letters.

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Elaine Clanton Harpine, Ph.D.

Elaine is a program designer with many years of experience helping at-risk children learn to read. She earned a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology (Counseling) from the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.